Routledge Handbook on Spaces of Mental Health and Wellbeing

Candice P. Boyd is an artist-geographer and clinical psychologist. They are currently an honorary Principal Fellow in the School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Melbourne researching spaces of mental health and wellbeing, arts-based knowledge translation, and climate-related mental health issues. They are author of Exhibiting Creative Geographies (2023) and Non-Representational Geographies of Therapeutic Art Making (2017), co-author of Emotion and the Contemporary Museum (2020), and co-editor of Non-Representational Theory and the Creative Arts (2019). Louise E. Boyle is a health geographer and Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Geographical and Earth Sciences at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. She completed an ESRC-funded PhD on The Social and Anticipatory Geographies of Social Anxiety Disorder (2019) and built on this research through an ESRC Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship (2020–2022). She is the author of Anxious Geographies: Worlds of Social Anxiety (Routledge, 2024). Sarah L. Bell is a health geographer at the University of Exeter, whose work examines experiences of mental health, wellbeing, disability, and social inclusion in and with diverse forms of ‘nature’ – from parks, gardens, woodlands, coast, and countryside to the weather, seasons, and climate change (www.sensing-nature.com). Most recently, Sarah has been developing new collaborations to understand how the climate crisis – and prominent societal responses to it – is shaping the everyday lives and adaptive capacities of people with varied experiences and histories of disability (www.sensing-climate.com). Ebba Högström is a professor in architecture at Umeå University. Her research interest is in social and experiential dimensions of architecture and the built environment. A specific interest is in geographies of welfare institutions and infrastructures of care. Currently, she is engaged in research projects addressing housing and living environments for vulnerable groups, i.e., people with mental ill-health and older people. Together with C Nord, she has edited the book Caring Architecture: Institutions and Relational Practices (2017). Joshua Evans is an associate professor of human geography at the University of Alberta. He is a social geographer with interests in spaces of care, home, and work and their role in shaping the lived experiences of socially marginalized and vulnerable individuals, as well as spaces of policy development and implementation and their role in the creation of healthy, enabling, and equitable urban environments. His most recent research focuses on housing, homelessness, and urban justice. Alak Paul is a health geographer at the University of Chittagong, Bangladesh. His research interest covers stigmatized diseases and public health. He focuses on everyday geographies of marginalized or vulnerable people in his research, especially how geographic space or place plays a role in reshaping the life of people or the environment. He is the author of HIV/AIDS in Bangladesh: Stigmatized People, Policy and Place (2020) and co-editor of Geography in Bangladesh: Concepts Methods and Applications (Routledge, 2019) and The Palgrave Handbook of Social Fieldwork (2023). Ronan Foley is an associate professor in health geography and GIS at Maynooth University, Ireland, with expertise in therapeutic landscapes and geospatial planning within health and social care environments. His research focuses on relationships between water, health, and place, including two books and journal articles on holy wells, spas, social and cultural histories of swimming, and ‘blue space’. He is an Editorial Board member of Health & Place, was Editor of Irish Geography, 2015–2022 and chairs the MU Healthy Campus Steering Group. He collaborates on water/health projects with colleagues in Ireland, UK, Spain, Germany, New Zealand, and Australia.

1 Introducing the Routledge Handbook on Spaces of Mental Health and Well-Being

SECTION 1

2 Introducing Green and Blue Spaces

Part A: Implications for Mental Health

3 Greenspace programmes for mental health

Wendy Masterton

4 Ten big picture actions for mainstreaming gardening into public health

Jonathan (Yotti) Kingsley

5 What is the Right Dose of Nature for Mental Health? Quantity, Quality, Distance, and Exposure Time

Marco Garrido-Cumbrera

6 Nature contact and burnout

Thomas Astell-Burt, Michael Navakatikyan and Xiaoqi Feng

7 Biodiversity for Health and Wellbeing

Jessica Fisher, Gail E. Austen, Martin Dallimer, Katherine N. Irvine and Zoe Davies

8 The affective quality of blue spaces – The Case Study of a Wetland in Wakiso District, Uganda

Sophie-Bo Heinkel and Thomas Kistemann

Green and Blue Spaces

Part B: Critical Perspectives

9: Untangling nature-based Interventions’ influences on participants’ mental wellbeing: Critiquing 'nature on prescription'.

Andy Harrod and Nadia von Benzon

10 Seeking asylum, ‘therapeutic landscapes’, agency and lived citizenship.

Josephine Biglin

11 Green gentrification and its impacts on mental health: unveiling the evidence on sociocultural and physical exclusion linked to green and blue spaces

Margarita Triguero-Mas and Helen V.S. Cole

12 How do we understand the impact of immersion in blue space on mental health and wellbeing?

Hannah Denton, Kay Aranda and Charlie Dannreuther

13 Lifestyle sports, social justice, blue space and mental health inequalities

Belinda Wheaton and Rebecca Olive

14 Intoxicated: Men, Mental Health, Wellbeing, and Pollution in Blue Spaces

Clifton Evers

SECTION 2

15 Introducing Lived and Embodied Spaces

16 Feeling SAD: embodied geographies of seasonal affective disorder

Shawn Bodden, Hayden Lorimer and Hester Parr

17 Geographies of Panic: Towards a relational conceptualisation of panic ‘disorder’

Candela Sánchez-Rodilla Espeso

18 Taking up space: anorexia nervosa and embodied healing

Grace Lucas

19 Dance Movement Psychotherapy in acute adult psychiatry: space, time and affective atmospheres in the ward landscape

Mary Coaten

20 Embodiment and space in understandings of suicide and self-harm

Amy Chandler, Sarah Huque, Rebecca, Helman, Joe Anderson and Emily Yue

21 The university as a lived space: The experience of students in distress

Emma Farrell and Sheena Hyland

SECTION 3

22 Introducing Creative Spaces

23 Spaces of Australian Indigenous Song and Dance

Paul Callaghan and Jesse Hodgetts

24 Caring through circulation: reflections on affect and materiality at the second-hand book market of College Street, Calcutta

Diti Bhattacharya

25 BAJO EL OLIVO (Under the Olive Tree): Experimenting with A Posthuman Life and Landscape with Radical Affection in an Artist Residency

Juliana España Keller

26 Distributed Assemblages of Cognition and Health (Or) How TikTok ate my Mind

Jamie McPhie and David A. G. Clarke

27 Distance and Belonging in the Studio

Christian Edwardes

28 Creative Spaces of Disaster Recovery

Kate E. W. Douglas

29 Regional arts festivals as infrastructures of care

Michelle Duffy, Judith Mair and Elaine Stratford

SECTION 4

30 Introducing Work and Home Spaces

31 Recovering Place and Wellbeing for Individuals with Mental Illness

Nastaran Doroud and Ellie Fossey

32: Permanent Supportive Housing: A Key Role in Serving the Needs of Unhoused Individuals

Deborah K. Padgett

33 Exploring the complex negotiation of home, aging, and mental health: Haven or not?

Rachel Herron

34 Haven or Hell?: An introduction to trauma informed design as a mechanism for place-based healing

Julia Woodhall-Melnik, Cassandra Monette, and Erin MacKenney

35 Breadwinning, Mental Health and the Geographies of Masculinity

Robert Wilton and Ann Fudge Schormans

36 Creating space for youth mental health online: A clinician’s perspective

Candice P. Boyd

37 Landscapes of trauma and mental health

Jesse Proudfoot

SECTION 5

38 Introducing Institutional and Post-Institutional Spaces

39 ‘Healing Architecture’ and the Spatial Organization of the Psychiatric Clinic

Thorben Peter Høj Simonsen

40 Islands as Spaces of Institutionalised Mental Health and Wellbeing

Robin Kearns and John Connell

41 The New Institutional Landscape for People with Mental Health Problems

Alain Topor, Tore Dag Bøe, Oyvind Hope, Ottar Ness and Jan Friesinger

42 A New Space for ‘Curing Madness’: Circulation of an Open-Door model between France and Argentina in the early 20th century

Hervé Guillemain and Fernando Ferrari

43 Carceral Riskscapes in the Institutions of Care

Virve Repo

44 Writing the Asylum: Archive and Creativity in the Abandoned Space

Gillean McDougall

45 Mental health geography in the cracks: between abolition and reform

Ebba Högström and Chris Philo